Monday, June 8, 2009

RARE Star Wars Book Cover Art For Sale!

For the first time ever, I am offering my original cover art from Star Wars: Rebel Force "Renegade". This is the third Book in the brand new Scholastic series. This is not a sketch card people this is the ACTUAL art work from the book cover. Okay, I know the Art on the book is so small. Well, I don't actually create the art that small I work much bigger, and then we shrink it down. For this project I do each figure separately, and then we photoshop the cover together.

So this makes for several pieces of ORIGINAL art.

. The goal for all of the art on these books is to show outfits or poses that are not seen that much or at all in the movies. Some characters like Han Solo, don;t really change outfits that much. But with Luke, there are a few different looks that not many people have seen, so it's fun to step out of the normal white tunic.

We have to be careful too, because the story line takes place right after the first death star has been destroyed. So the character still have to have that late 70's look to them.

For "Renegade" we chose to go with Luke Skywalker wearing his briefly seen PANCHO. He does wear this poncho in Episode IV: A New Hope. we see it when Obi Wan and Luke are arriving at the Millenium Falcon in Docking Bay 54 on Mos Eisley (right after the cantina scene for all you non Star Wars nerds:). It's the scene when Luke utters the famous line "What a piece of Junk".

The funny thing about this Pancho is he put it on right before they go to the docking bay. Luke boards the Falcon with his Pancho on, and then the next scene he has obviously taken the poncho off, never to be worn again... Until Book 3 of Star Wars:Rebel Force. Right?:)

So here is Luke on the cover in all his Pancho Glory. Lightsaber ignited. BTW, it is intentional that Luke looks a little unsure about holding the lightsaber. He's not really "Return of the Jedi" expert Lightsaber wielder yet. All that is explained in the Book.

At his sides are his faithful droids R2D2 and C-3P0.

Amazingly it was really hard to find a clear photo reference of these poses. I worked with Lucasfilm photo archive, and believe it or not the production photos from "A New Hope" are TERRIBLE. Seriously, it looks as if George Lucas had an aunt come on the set with an old Instamatic camera and take OFFICIAL shots. It's comical! One picture looks good, but it's blurry, while another one cuts off the top of some ones head or their feet right at the ankles. Crooked pictures ALL over the place. Which is why for " A New Hope" we see the same pictures over and over again. But it was explained to me that there are few production pictures from A NEW HOPE because most of them got lost...I mean, they still have a lot, but they HAD 5-10 times more photos back in the 70's. Things were different back then in the 70's.

Here are some of the reasons they lost photo's, or what was explained to me.

1. They had several photographers take lots of photos, but many of them kept the negatives and original prints. Records from "A New Hope" were apparently a mess, so the names of many photographers got lost. Many of those Photographers probably lost the photos themselves.

2. Boxes were mislabeled, or never labeled at all in the archives. So there actually could be a box of pictures hiding somewhere.

3. Star Wars had such a hard time finding screen to play on (in the beginning), many people figured it would be a flop and scrapped all their Star Wars stuff, only to regret it a few months later.

4. Time, some pictures deteriorated with no copies ever being made.

In a way, I feel privileged to be able to bring back to life rarely seen outfits and poses. It's fun.

For the back cover we have a completely new Star Wars character X-7. This was great because I got to design a never before seen Character in the Star Wars Universe. I don;t know...that is just COOL!

X-7 is an interesting character. You gotta read the books to get the details.

When I got the description of X-7 I was perplexed. Basically they said "X-7 needs to be fierce, scared, and grizzled yet calm, unintimidating, and easy to talk to". WHat?

We went through so many looks, and nothing was coming back ok.

Finally I decided to use my Brother in law as my model, and BINGO they loved it. They said "That is x-7"! So, Ladies and Gentleman, X-7 is indeed my Brother in Law Guillaum. Granted, I added the scars, but he really does look the part.

All of these pieces are available for purchase.

Each piece is 9 X11, illustrated with MArker and colored pencil on Bristol.